Pocket-Sized Puppetry: Crafting Mini Characters with Moving Mouths

1. Pocket Puppets Intro: Have you ever noticed how a simple puppet instantly changes the energy in a room? There's a unique kind of magic in puppet making. It has this incredible power to bring a sense of joy, curiosity, and just pure play back into our lives, no matter our age. When we create characters, we give ourselves permission to imagine, to tell stories, to become someone else, and to just have fun. And today, we're going to bring that big imagination down to a very small scale. Hey, folks. I'm Luci here at Ballyhoo Creations in my home studio where I create dolls, puppets and plushies that makers all over the world bring to life using their sewing or embroidery machines. And today, I've got a no so option for you, too. I love engineering new characters, but more than that, I love making the craft accessible, which is why I'm so excited about today's project, because for this tiny character, you don't even need a sewing machine. You can use traditional stitching, or you can use fabric glue for 100% no so puppets. In this class, we're crafting a tiny five inch pocket puppet complete with a fully functional moving mouth and poseable limbs. Step by step, we'll walk through the entire process from a flat piece of fabric to a fully realized little character. I'll show you how to trace, cut, and turn these miniature pieces cleanly, and then we'll dive into character design. I'm going to share ten different ideas for creating unique puppet eyes, plus fun ways to embellish your puppet to give them a one of a kind personality. This class is designed for anyone who loves miniatures or doll making or puppet making or just wants a fun creative escape. If you're an experienced soist, you'll love the precision of this mini scale. And if you've never touched a needle and thread in your life, the no so glue method means you can jump right in with total confidence. By the end of these lessons, you'll have a pocket sized talkative little friend ready for the spotlight and the skills to build an entire gallery of miniature characters. Are you ready to bring a little more play into your life? Grab some fuzzy fabric, clear off a small corner of a table, and let's start crafting. Yeah. 2. Project: Hey, I'm glad you decided to join us. In this lesson, we're talking all about your class project and gathering all the supplies you need to bring your pocket puppet to life. There are more details about the supplies in each of the lessons, and you can find a downloadable PDF supply list that you can then print out and take shopping with you. Your assignment for this class is to create your very own five inch miniature puppet complete with a moving mouth and poseable limbs. And then snap a photo and share that in the class project section. As we go through the lessons, you can choose to follow the traditional sewing method, either using a sewing machine or by hand stitching, or you can choose the 100% no sew method using a fabric glue. Whichever path you choose, the end result is a charming pocket sized character that is uniquely yours. Before we dive in, let's go over our supply list. And these are the things that everybody's going to need no matter which method you choose, glue or sew. We'll start off with our fuzzy fabric, and you just need something that has a little bit of furrinss to it. Minki is a good choice. There's this some stretchy, small Sharpe. It's not exactly a Sharpe. And then this one here was a sweatshirt or sweater type of thing. And I encourage you to look at second hand materials to make your pocket puppets with because you can go to the thrift store and find some second hand clothing. This is like a fuzzy sweatshirt hoodie type thing. You can find blankets. Even pajama pants have a good texture for making these. So you don't have to go to the fabric store and buy something brand new. You might have something already around that you were going to donate anyway, or you could go thrift shopping and find something really furry and nice and soft. So check that out, too. You'll need about a five by seven inch piece of fabric for two sides. So two pieces, five by 7 ". If you're working with this kind of furry fabric and cutting it, then you definitely should consider wearing a dust mask because these little fibers can get in the air in your nose and in your lungs. And that's not good. So I'm just going to say safety first, put a dust mask on when you cut this stuff. You'll need some felt. Plain, regular craft felt is fine. Or I actually like the peel and stick or self adhesive because then I can use less glue. So that's just an option. Black felt is a good one. You could also do pink or red for inside of the mouth. And if you get black, not only can you put it in the mouth, but you can do things like eyes and other embellishments with that. Of course, you're going to need some scissors, and a good sharp pair is always good to have around. Fabric glue. I like fabrifix for this project, or my other preference would be a fine tip, hot glue gun. No, it's not turned on. It's why touching it. And these fabric, Serbonder fabric gluticks these work great with fabric. But any hot glue with a detailed tip is going to work for this, or just get the fabrifix either one are going to work great. Whether you're sewing or gluing, I do recommend having a little bit of fabric glue around for the embellishments. Just need a handful of a fiber fill, any kind of polyester stuffing is good for the head and body. You'll need a clothes pin or some other kind of clip. This is going to be the little magic ingredient that makes the mouth work. You're going to need some type of eye, and don't worry too much about this yet because I've got a whole lesson on a lot of different ways that you can add eyes to your puppet. This part is optional, but I do recommend some aluminum armature wire from the craft store. It's very easy to bend. It won't rust, and it's much more durable than regular wire. And then also a pair of wire cutters. If you're going to work with the wire, you don't have to put wire in your puppet, but that wire is what allows the arms and legs to be posed. So I do recommend it. And if you don't have that aluminum armature wire, you could also use something like pipe cleaner, chenille stem, floral wire, jewelry wire. Any kind of fin wire is going to work for this. If you're choosing to sew your puppet, you will need some tearaway stabilizer. This is made for machine embroidery, but it's a really good way to hold our fabric sandwich together and just stitch over the traced lines. So I definitely recommend this. You'll also need needle and thread. Of course, your sewing machine or hand sewing, whatever you're doing that way. And you'll need to turn your puppet right side out if you're sewing it. So I recommend a pair of hemostats or turning tubes or some other way to turn those tiny limbs. If you're gluing your puppet seams instead, we're going to be making a clear plastic template like this of the pattern shape. And I recommend either a cheap cutting mat from the dollar store is one way of doing that, or just any kind of packaging plastic that you may have leftover, pull that out of your recycling bin, and you can use something like that. And finally, you might want some little embellishments. I've got some little pom poms here that I'm going to use for nose. You can have flowers or ribbons. Here's some extra felt or fun foam that you might want to use for facial features. Also, air dried clay is a good thing to use, and this is one where the nose and the horns were made with the air dry clay. You can also make the eyes and other features with that. So this is another very inexpensive, easy to use material. Once you've decided on your supplies, you are ready to start building. If you're sewing your puppet seams, you'll want to watch the lesson on sewing seams. But if you're gluing the seams, you can skip the sewing one and skip straight to the gluing seams lesson instead. I will confess, this class was actually going to be for sewing only, but then I started experimenting with the Noso version, and I saw how great it turned out, so I decided to add that in. So hopefully, that doesn't throw you off. Alrighty gather your materials, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Sew Seams: We're going to get started, and we're going to take our pattern piece. This is just one piece that you have here for the body head. All of the pieces are one piece, and then there's this little 1 " circle for the mouth that you'll cut from felt. But don't cut out the actual puppet from your paper. We're going to take this product called tearaway stabilizer. After you stitch on this, it easily tears away from your stitches. So different products that you could look for would be sulkis tear easy is one of them. It's a very thin and lightweight one. Also, Pelon stitch and tear light is another option that you can find at places like Walmart or sewing supply stores. And these are machine embroidery stabilizers, is what they're sold for, but they work great for machine sewing of small parts, and you're about to see that. Any tearaway stabilizer will work for this. You may be wondering, can I just use regular paper or tissue paper? And the answer is yes, it will work. However, those are not meant to be sewn on the sewing machine. So if pieces of it get down in your bobbin case, it would be a problem. This product is actually made for sewing. It's not going to damage your needle. So I'm going to recommend that you use the Taraway stabilizer. So we're just going to put this over our pattern on the paper. Nothing's getting cut out. And then I'm just going to trace it with a pencil or any kind of fabric safe pen you could use and just trace around the whole thing. It's okay if it's not perfect. And I'm going to just speed up through that. You might be noticing that the pattern is very blocky and chunky, like on the hands and the feet, they're squared off. That's just so that if you're not very skilled at sewing small curved lines, this will be easier for you. When you get to the corner, you pivot instead of trying to go around a little curve. If you want to round them off, you certainly can. But I decided to make the pattern so that you don't have to, and it does sew a little more quickly. But that's up to you, however you want to do it. And also make sure that you trace the placement of the mouth onto your stabilizer, as well as the two eye placement dots. And if you want to, you could put this arrow here. This is the fur direction like that. And then if you have stretchy fabric, you want to make sure that it's going across the puppet, whereas the fur needs to be pointing down. Okay? So now we've got our little tracing. And then all we have to do is take our fabric, make sure that the fur is pointing down. You can tell when you pet the fur, it should lay down flat, whereas if you go against the grain, you see how it kind of bubbles up like that. If you go different directions, it just doesn't lie as smooth as that down direction. And I'm going to This is right sides together. You can either fold it or if you have two pieces that's cut, that's fine. It doesn't make any difference. And I'm going to lay my pattern on top to make sure that there's room outside of the pattern. I got plenty of room here. And then we're going to pin that in place or use clips, whatever you have and prefer to use. If your stabilizer is hanging over the edge, you can just fold it over. You see what I've done here? This actually started bunching up, and I don't want that. I don't want my stabilizer to get bunched up it could distort my fabric, and that's not what we want. So I could either fold it or I could even cut it so that it's even with the fabric. It doesn't really matter. We're just trying to keep all of these layers together because we're going to take this over to the sewing machine and stitch it. And another thing to note is you want to start here in the middle of the head and stitch all the way down one side until you get to the center between the legs, then stop and go back to the top and stitch down the other side. The reason we're not going to go all the way around in a full, you know, full circuit is that it will distort one side as you go down, and the other side will distort up, and it could twist. So just a little safer thing to do is just always stitch it down. Just a note here, if you don't have a sewing machine and you want to hand sew this, you certainly can with a needle and thread. I would just use a backstitch, if you're familiar with hand sewing and just stitch right along this line through all of the layers, and you'll be fine. I'm gonna actually put a pin in there, 'cause I don't like how this is distorting. So just be careful when you're sewing that you don't sew over the pin or stick yourself with it. That's why I like clips better. So you can hand sew this, but I'm going to use the machine because it's much faster. On your sewing machine, you should change your stitch length to something like 2 millimeters. That's two on the stitch length dial. And the reason for that is it's going to slow your machine down so it's easier to sew around these curves. And it's also going to give us a nice tight seam on this small little puppet. In a little bit, I'll speed up the video of the sewing so you don't have to watch me in real time. But just to start out, I wanted you to see the speed that I sew this small part. It's pretty slow. Um, I am pivoting. I have a knee lift on this particular machine, so you're not going to see me reaching around to lift the pressor foot all the time. It doesn't matter what kind of machine you have and how you do that, as long as you're just pivoting around the corners or you can smooth them out. This is the actual speed that I'm going, and then we'll go ahead and speed through the rest of this. At this point, I've gotten down to the bottom between the legs. I'm going to stop, and I'm going to restart at the top again and just stitch down the same way I did. Our stitching is done, our seams are finished. Now we've got it sewn all the way. And remember, we went down one side to the middle down here, and then back around. And you can see that it stitched through all the layers. I got a little bit extra up there. That's fine. And you see how that stabilizer easily comes away. Now, I wanted to point out that I did not stitch exactly on all the lines. If you look here on that toe, I missed, and that's okay. You don't have to stitch exactly perfectly on the lines because this project is pretty forgiving. You're not matching anything up. So if you miss or go outside the lines, you're one thing that you do want to watch for, though, is that if you are inside the lines too much, then the arms or the legs, they might be too skinny to turn right side out, and you're gonna make your job harder. So just be careful about that and make sure that you have enough room. Don't try to make these too skinny. I'm going to go ahead and cut this little mouth circle out so that I can mark it. And you have to be very careful when you do this because you just want to cut off the stabilizer and not the fabric. You can even just tear it a little bit because it's easy to tear the stabilizer, but not the fabric. And the reason that I'm doing this is I'm going to be able to mark that mouth placement more easily. Okay. Just be careful you're not cutting the fur underneath. We're just cutting away a little circle of stabilizer so that we can then take some kind of fabric marking pencil or marker, and a washable crayola crayon, make sure that it's washable. And then same thing for the eyes, I'm just going to use a pencil to poke through that stabilizer and then make a little dot there. And this is on the wrong side of the fabric. And before we tear away the rest of our stabilizer, you want to cut this out first because it's going to be hard to see your seam lines on the fabric that can be harder to cut. I think it's much easier to cut away from the stabilizer here. I should also say here, you want to choose your top and bob and thread to match your fabric. I actually chose one that would stand out a little bit so that you can see it in this tutorial. But I'm just going to cut this out and use about a quarter two, maybe even less than a quarter inch away from the seam. You don't want to cut into that seam, that'll mess things up. I'm going to use both big and little scissors for this, and we'll speed through it because I think you know how to cut. Whenever you get to an inside corner, just make sure that you kind of clip close to that seam. I will say, at this point, if you're working with a fabric like Minke where it has all of these tiny little pieces of fiber coming off, you really should be wearing some kind of dust mask over your nose and mouth because this stuff does get in the air, and if you get in your lungs, you're going to be probably sniffling and coughing for a couple of days. So do wear a dust mask if your Minkes a really bad offender, but any kind of fur, if it's getting up in the air, if it's blowing around, you should be wearing a mask. We've got everything cut out, and you saw how I clipped into these little inside corners, even around the tops of the feet here, here into the crotch area. We need to make sure that we're clipped almost to the seam and under the arms, as well. I think we've got all of those nice and clipped. So now we can go ahead and remove the stabilizer. And this stuff just tears away very easily from your seam. That's one of the reasons that we used the short stitch length, makes it tear even easier. But don't rip it off too quickly. You do want to be a little bit gentle because you don't want to pull out your seams. If your sewing machine tension is set correctly, you should not have any problems tearing this away. If it's pulling out your stitches, that probably means your tension was too loose. I did have a problem, and I'm going to show you how I'm going to fix that in a little bit. This happens to me sometimes. You don't have to worry about getting every tiny bit of stabilizer off because you're still going to be able to turn this right side out. And now you may notice we're ready to turn this right side out, but there's no hole. We did not leave a hole, and that was on purpose. Usually, you'll have a hole in the seam somewhere, but this is a doll making technique that I actually prefer. We're gonna cut our own hole in the back. Make sure you've marked the face on the front here. So we're going to turn it over to the back, and we're just going to separate the fabric because we only want to cut on one layer of fabric, not both. A little snip. Get your scissors inside, just one layer, and then we're going to cut up through the middle of the head. And then down to just a little bit into the body right between the arms. So we've got, what is this about 2 " right here. So, what is that? It's about an inch and a half. You could make it more like 2 ". I'm gonna make it go up a little higher. That's going to make it easier to do the mouth in a little bit. This hole should be big enough for you to turn it right side out, and it's also where we're going to put the clip that is going to work the mouth. Now, some tips on turning this right side out. I'm going to use my hemostats. This is my favorite tool. You could buy these at sewing store or someplace like that. But honestly, this is my favorite pair, and these are the fishing aisle for people who go fishing, and they use it to pull hooks out of fish mouths. But it has a nice rounded nose here. You don't want it to be too pointy because it could go through your seam. But it's got that nice square jaw, and I can just put it in. Let's do the hard part here all the way to the bottom of the toe, and then just I'm opening that up. When you put it down in that foot, I'm going to open it up a little bit and just put a little bit of that tip of the seam in there. And then you pinch here at the top. Right at the tip of that hemostat. And as you pinch that fabric, you can pull it through. And we're just going to pull the limbs into the body first. I'm going to do the feet that way. And then I'll show you another tool that you can use. Some people use chopsticks to turn things right side out. Some people even use their scissors. I can't use either. Scissors will cut. I mean, I don't understand why people use scissors, but I don't even use a chopstick. If you don't have hemostats and you don't like these are $5, $6. But if you don't want to use that, you could use some tubes, you could actually use two different sized straws. You just need small pieces. You need a larger one and a smaller one. What you do is you put the big tube into the limb. And that was the problem that I wanted to point out. I actually my fabric didn't go all the way to the edge here. You can see one layer of fabric didn't go all the way to the edge here, and that's a problem, but I'm going to fix it later by gluing this closed once my glue gun is going, or you could hand stitch that closed, or you could just put it back on the machine. It's gonna be okay. Sometimes we'll have a little missing, you know, the seam misses the edge of the fabric, and it's pretty easy to fix just by gluing or stitching that back together. So let's do the other arm. Just put the turning tube, the fat one inside the arm, and then you use the skinny one to just put that seam, just push on it. And then when you push, and again, we're squeezing right at the top there, and the fabric is going to curl over the skinny tube, this one, and it turns it right side out. And then we just pull that tube out from there, and that's turned. So we've got everything is inside the body. I'm going to use the hemostats on this one that's broken. There we go. And now, all the arms and legs can come out, and the body and head are very easy to turn with your fingers. So that's all there is to the turning of your pocket puppet. And again, don't worry about this little mistake. These happen, and we can fix it. He's cute already. That wraps up the lesson on sewing the seams of your pocket puppet. You saw how to trace the pattern onto some tearaway stabilizer, which not only makes it easier to stitch tiny parts, but it also stabilizes a fabric so it doesn't stretch while you're stitching it. You saw how to stitch it on a sewing machine. You also have the option of hand sewing if you wanted to do that. And then we cut out the pocket puppet with a very small seam allowance, and you learned how to turn tiny parts right side out, and a couple of different tools were shown for that the hemostats and turning tubes. 4. OR Glue Seams: I wanted to see what would happen if I glue instead of sew this together. So I'm gonna try an experiment here, and let's see what happens. I'm tracing my puppet pattern onto some clear plastic so I can cut out a template and then trace around that onto fur. I'm actually going to cut a little bit beyond the line so that my puppet turns out the right size. Let's try that. See what happens. You don't have to do all the square cuts. You can certainly round this out. It's easier to cut when you round off the edges, and I think it's gonna work better when we glue it and make it a little easier that way, too. Let's try it with some This is an minky fabric with some short fur. Let's see what happens with this. Should be pretty easy to trace this. Do I have enough for two? Oh, just barely. It's really, really gonna cut it close. Let's see what happens. I'm using my washable crayola marker again. These come in handy when you're working with fabric because if you need to wash them, you can. But you do have to be careful because I found that sometimes it gets ink on your fingers and it spreads on the fabric, and you may end up staining the front side, the good side of your fur just because there's so much ink on there. It's a good time to put on a mask. And just cut out both the pieces. Try to avoid cutting the fur if you can. And then clean up the workspace. We don't want all that extra fur getting in the way of the glue. On one side of this blue puppet, I'm going to use the fabrifix glue. It takes longer to set up, but I can make a longer bead of it. You can see that here. On the other side, I'm going to use the fabric hot glue, which I have to make much smaller beads at a time because I don't want it to set up before I put the two pieces together. But once I get that done, that side's pretty much ready to go. I didn't quite love how the edges of that blue puppet looked because the backing could show in the seams. And I'll show you that at the end of this lesson. I really wanted to try something that was furrier that would cover that seam better, but I couldn't actually trace onto this red fur because it's furry on both sides of the fabric. So what I did instead is I clipped my template, the same template I used to trace around. I just clipped it onto two pieces of fur that were right sides together, and then I cut it out that way. And that is actually going to work better, I think. And then I just glued the two sides together. And that hid the seams much better with that double sided fur. I'll show you both of them at the end. I sort of jumped ahead here and finished off these two puppets that I glued the fabrics together. And on the blue one where you could see the backing and trace on it, you can see that seam. You can kind of see the backing in the seam. It still looks good, but I think that the red one actually looks a lot better because it was much furrier, and we cut out around that template for this one, and you can't even see the seams on this one. So this glue method turned out actually better than I expected. It was an experiment when I started but I'm impressed. So if you don't want to sew, you don't have to. You can just glue the two sides together. Different kind of fabrics are gonna give different results. Well, that wraps up the lesson on gluing the seams together. And what started out as an experiment actually worked out rather well. You can either trace the pattern onto the backside of your fabric, or if that's not really easy to do, you could just make a rigid template out of some clear plastic. Packaging or one of those dollar store cutting boards works great for that. Just cut out your template pieces and then cut around it and glue, again, wrong sides together when you're gluing. You could use either fabric glue or hot glue. I used both and I got good results with both of them. Use whatever you prefer. 5. Mouth: Now we're ready to put the little mouth on this guy. And I had showed you earlier how I have this little plastic clear plastic just from a piece of packaging that I cut out the 1 " mouth pattern from your paper pattern. I just traced onto that clear plastic and then cut it out, and that's going to make it easier to trace this onto some felt for the inner mouth. Could use any kind of felt. This is just craft store felt. Cheap stuff is fine. I do like to use the felt that is the peel and stick. It has a sticky back because I find that this stuff is sticky enough to stick to most furs, the short furs, and it's much easier to trace, also. So I'm just going to put it down on the back side of this sticky felt. If you were doing it on regular felt, you would want to use a chalk or something that's going to show up on your black felt. For a puppet mouth, I should mention too, the type of felt that we use is usually a black, but if black is not going to show up against your fabric, you might want to use a pink or a red. If you do something that's really a weird color, like a green, for example, for some kind of monster, that's fine, too, but you just have to keep in mind, sometimes green coming out of the mouth or even red. It looks like the mouth is full of something, like the red sometimes looks like their mouth is full of blood, green might look like they're like, oozing slime out of their mouth. There's just something about human psychology and the inside mouth color that it's typically you want to stick with black or a pink or red. I'm just saying that a little tip for you. It's okay to break the rules, know that you're breaking the rules. Then I'm just going to cut out this little circle. It does not need to be a perfect circle. Just not that big of a deal because it's not going to show that obvious, but, you know, clean it up a little if you want to. And again, we marked on the inside where our mouth needs to go. I can kind of see that blue line in there. But it's on the inside, but we need it on the outside. And a way that you can do that is just take a stick pin and stick the pin around a few points of that marking and then transfer it to the front. That's the top of the mouth. That's the bottom of the mouth right there. So now I know about where I want my felt circle to stick to. Make sure that pin is out of my way. Kind of flatten this head out as much as we can. And we're going to stick the felt right there. Another tip is to make a little slit in your circle on both right and left edges, right in the middle where you're gonna be folding it. Actually, just fold it in half. Like that and then just snip. That's going to help it crease better and make the puppet mouth move. Now we can peel away our backing and make sure that those little slits that you just cut are on the right and left side. And there we go. Just press that down. If you don't have the sticky felt, you could just use a little bit of fabric glue or a little bit of hot glue to attach the felt onto the puppet. Here are several different kinds of clips that we can use for our puppet mouth. It's going to go in the back and clip onto the folded mouth. And we're going to glue that in place. A clothes pin works very well. The only problem with the clothes pin, it doesn't open too widely. And also, it sticks out really far in the back. So if you wanted to carry this around like on a purse or a keychain or something, the clothes pin is very unwieldy. The shortest kind of clip would be a binder clip, but binder clips are very hard to open and close, and you won't get as much mouth movement with a clip like that, but it does work with a binder clip. A little bit bigger. You don't want to use the tiniest ones, but this hurts my fingers when I squeeze this. So this is not something I would use very long. Um, you could also use a shorter clothes pin, like the little crafty ones, but you're not going to get as much movement because it doesn't open as wide. You can see with a regular clothes pin, you're just not going to get as much wide mouth movement. And the other clip that I do like to use, these are something from the dollar store in the craft aisle, and these have good opening and they're easy to work. The only problem with this one is it's very got squared off edges. It could cut your fabric. So I like to put a little bit of tape over the edges just to make sure that these sharp corners don't poke through my fabric, eventually. And then you also have the option of a larger clip, whether you cut it to size or leave it large like this. This is like a little chip clip or something like that. Any kind of clip or clamp, try it and see if it works. This one just makes a bigger mouth. It goes like, all the way across the head. But that is okay. It's just a different look. For example, here's a finished one that has that same kind of clip in it, and you see how wide and flat the mouth is, but it still opens nicely, and it works. So look around your house and see if you already have a clip, if you don't do like these little clamps a lot, but like I said, you need to pad these corners quite a bit because you don't want that to cut your fabric. It's pretty sharp. For this one, let's use just the regular clothes pin because I think most people have access to that. All we have to do here is we're going to fold that little circle. And move your side fabric out of the way. We want it to go right there, a clip. And you want the tip of the clothes pin to be right around the tip of the felt circle here. If you push it too far in, then your puppet mouth is going to disappear, and you won't really see any edges until it's open. And that's fine, too. That's not the worst thing in the world. If you have it too far back, then you're gonna have these really dark edges, and the lips are going to kind of play out like that, and you won't get as much movement in your puppet mouth. So I recommend putting the edge of the clip right around the fabric right there at the tip of the felt circle, okay? I'm going to use hot glue. You could also use a fabric glue for this, and I am going to glue just one side at a time. I'm going to do, let's see, the top first, I think. And this is a fabric hot glue, but for something like this for so small, it's not really a big deal what kind of hot glue you're using. Make sure that your sides are out of the way. I'm just going to push that fabric circle in until I can feel the clothes pin right there at the edge of that circle. Fabric glue is a little bit easier to work with because it doesn't set up as quickly. So if you need to move things around, you can. And then, same thing here. I've already got it glued, and I'm just going to add a little bit of glue onto here, clamp that down, and then check it from the front side and make sure that it's right where I want it right there. I can feel it. Right there. Alright, so his glue has set up in there, and I've got his head turned, all the edges pushed out. And now you can see his mouth is working. Hello. Hey. And that's it, folks. That's how you make a moving mouth for your pocket puppet. You saw how to use different kinds of clips and ones that you can try, how to attach the felt mouth to the outside of the puppet's face, how to glue the clip on the inside, and also how to position it so that you get the best little speech pattern. And I can't stress this enough. I am not responsible for the words that come out of your puppet's mouth. 6. (optional) Wire Armature: This next step is totally optional. You do not have to wire your pocket puppet, but it gives it a lot more character and charm if you can move the arms and legs around. You should never put wire in a child's toy. If this is going to be played with by a little kid, please do not put wire in it. It's just too dangerous. The wire can come out. They are rough with wire. It can break. So just don't do it. These pocket puppets are really designed for adults and much older children. I'm going to be using this aluminum armature wire, which is very easy to bend. It also doesn't break very easily, and it doesn't rust. So aluminum armature wire is going to be the most durable long term thing that you can use for this. I'm using the thin one. It is 0.1 centimeters or 0.055 " in diameter. And I'm going to use 30 inch length. There's a couple of different brands. I buy this at Michael's Crafts is one place you can get it. And then, of course, on Amazon, you can find different brands there. A lot of different places where you can find this, look for aluminum or annealed aluminum, and it's usually called armature wire. The armature wire is getting more and more expensive. You could use other wires. You could put some pipe cleaners together or Chanel stems. You could use jewelry wire for something like this if you wanted to. You could even use floral wire if you already have that. But these are not going to be as durable or as easy to bend. They're also more prone to break when you bend them. So I do like the aluminum armature wire the best, but if you just want to do something quick and easy, use whatever wire you have. I am folding it in half, and that's the top of the half right there. And I'm going to put it inside my clip. I'm going to put it somewhere in this area and just string it through. So it's going to hang down from this inner clip area. Okay. And like I said, this is totally optional. You don't have to do this, but I'm going to show you how and now we're just going to use the body of the puppet as our template for where to bend the wires, okay? I'm going to twist it together a little bit around this bottom part of the clothes pin and twist it a few times until it's right around the arms. Then I'm going to take one side to the arm and bend it back towards the center, and I'm going to do the same thing with the other side. Bend it. Okay. And I'll make those two sides go down in the middle. What we're going to do with the arms is we're going to twist those. I like to just twist as I go along, at least to get so that I know what each piece is going to be, arm or leg or body. Okay, so we've got the two arms, and now we're going to put this back together and twist until we get down to the leg area. Right about there. And I like to have it where it comes out like hips and then goes down into the leg. And then back up because we're going to twist that leg also. Same thing here. Hips go down. Just kind of follow the pattern of your puppet. Okay. And then each loop, I'm going to get this out of the way. Each of these loops gets twisted, as well. That's going to be the legs, and a little loop at the end will go into the foot. It doesn't matter which direction you twist it, honestly. Okay. Got that. And then these little wire ends. I'm going to just pull these back up. I've got way extra. I did not need this much. So whatever excess that you have, just go ahead and clip that off. Somewhere in the body area. I'm just using wire cutters to clip this, and go ahead and twist, get that more closer to the body center for those arms. And then this we're going to use tape to tape around this to keep the wire from poking out. The kind of tape that you use is not that important. You could use a duct tape, a masking tape, something like that. I typically will use electrical tape when I'm doing something with wire because electrical tape is made to stick to wire, and it's a nice thick plastic, so I feel safe that the wire's not coming out. But like I said, a masking tape or duct tape or something like that. Scotch tape is not going to work as well for you, but use something that you already have. I'm a big fan of using what you have. It's kind of hard to get it in there. I do want to also get it up and over these shoulders. And just kind of get it something like that so that those little ends of the wire are not going to be bothering us. You see how that works? It's connected here to the clothes pin, somewhere in your clip. I'm going to tighten that up with another twist. And then we've got the arms and the legs. And we can bend the legs back into that shape that we had before. That's going to be fine. So to thread this through, get the arms in first. And just put it in there. And I had told you before how I have this little this little problem area right here. I'm just gonna put a little glue on it and fold it over. And that way, that will keep my wire from poking out. I'm not gonna let it bother me. I know that. 'Cause here's the thing about when you're making puppets. If you get a troublemaker like this little guy is being, that's just their personality. They can't help it. They're always going to be like that. So if this one wants to have something weird going on with his hand, let him have something weird going on with his hand. We don't really get to decide for them. There's some weird thing going on where they just kind of kick in and do their own thing. I'm gonna finish putting the wire in there. And for the legs, you really have to bend and just kind of have the m dive in there. Don't be afraid to bend this around and get it threaded down into the legs. If it's giving you too much problem, and this one is really giving me more problem than I think I've had in the over a dozen of these that I've been making in the last couple of days, you could always cut the slit a little more. If you need more room, that's okay, too. Wow, little guy, you're really annoying. I like to push the wire all the way down to the ends and then bend that foot You can also when you have wire in there, you can make the foot face forward. After I find it and bend it, and then you can turn the legs forward instead of having them out to the side. That's another advantage of having the wire in there. See how his foot is this way now. And yeah, you can pose him, and he can do different things. You can see how adding that wire, even though it's optional, it does add a lot more character to how that pocket puppet can pose and look while you're manipulating the mouth. You could have it straight out like that or he could be reaching forward. There's all different kind of things that you could do. You can even make him sit down. Sit in the palm of your hand like that. So, I like to put the wire in because I think it's a nice extra step to do. And that's how you put wire in your pocket puppet. It's optional, but it does add a lot of character. And again, I can't say this enough times. Do not put wire in a child's toy. If this is going to be played with by small children, please do not add the wire. Armature wire is the best choice here. It's more durable, but you could use other options. And you just bend the armature into place and insert it into the puppet. It's a very quick and easy thing to do, and it's well worth it because it adds so much charm. 7. Eyes: I Alright, now it's time to talk about eyes. And you see I've got a whole table full of little pocket puppets here with different eye types. I've got ten different ways to do eyes that I'm going to show you so that you have a whole bunch of options. The first and probably easiest but maybe not the cheapest is to get some purchased eyes. And I've got several here that I will show you. If you go to your materials list, there's a link in there to where I have a web page setup where you can link to different purchased eyes and things like that. And I can keep that updated more easily from a webpage. So just check your materials list and then just follow the link. Little puppet eyes are attached, and these are safety eyes, so they just have a little plastic back that will snap on the back of that. And you'll see that in a little bit. I'll show you how to install something like this. But we've got this option. We've actually got an option that's just a plain white, and you have to actually get some kind of little felt circle or something, we'll talk about that in a minute, too and make the pupil that way, but you can position the pupil better if you just have the blank white. We've also got these our purchased safety eye. These are actually a clear eye with a black pupil, and the pupil is off center. And that's a big deal with puppets. We don't want our puppets to look like a deer in the headlights, and I'll show you an example of why the type of eye you use matters because here's an example of one that has some Google eyes, and you notice the pupils are right set in the center, and he's just kind of got this blank stare. It's not as much character. Same thing goes for these purchased eyes. He's just staring straight ahead, but his eyes are close enough together that it's still a good expression because they're so small. Something like this would be an example of where the pupils are offset towards the center, you want it kind of looking towards its nose, and it looks like it's actually making eye contact with you when the pupils are offset towards the nose area. A lot of them, you'll see like that. That was an offset offset. So that's something to consider when you're making puppets. This one, again, the eyes are so small that it will make eye contact with you, even though the pupils are in the center. So keep that in mind. The bigger the eye, the more important that pupil placement is. But with smaller eyes, you can kind of get away with that deer and the headlights look a little more. But this is not the best. This is not something that's going to be making good eye contact with you. He's just kind of staring off into space. So that's why we like the offset pupils. And these clear ones are good. Like I said, you can paint them different colors. And I've even got just to show you acrylic craft paint, or I'm using a paint marker here, and you can just paint the back of it like that. And then that will give you the puppet eye with the white, with the black pupil or you can color it and have a colored iris instead. That's up to you how you want to do that. These four here in the center are the examples of different safety eyes. There are other ones that you can find. But craft stores, their selection is not very good anymore, so I'm looking online for a lot of the safety eyes. I do like about a 15 millimeter eye for these pocket puppets. Now, you can go larger or smaller. That's up to you. Whatever your preference is. But let's see. This is a 16 millimeter, so that's kind of big. This is a smaller one. This is more like probably an eight or ten millimeter, that's the diameter of the eye. So it's smaller, but it works. It works very well. So the safety eyes are a good option for your pocket puppets, and again, look for something around the 15 millimeter size, and you can go a little larger or smaller. That's the safety eyes. That was just the first option. The second option you can do is embroidered eyes. This is a machine embroidered eye, and I'll talk more towards the end of the Closs about where you can get that file from. But you could also do hand embroidery. If you're into hand embroidery, I'm not going to demonstrate how to do that because I am not a hand embroider. I'm a machine embroider. So these are the machine embroidered eyes on the design of PopcaPuppets. You could also do Google eyes. And these are a I believe this is either a 15 or 16 millimeter Google eye that I found at Walmart, a whole package of them. They don't look too great when they're sitting in the center. These aren't actually googly. These have been held in place by resin, and I've cut off the back of the Google eye and then filled it with some resin inside, put the pupil in there and put resin on top and then painted the back white. It still looks like a googly eye. It's just not googly. Here's another trick that you can use for this one is what I did here. I'm going to show you a little trick with Google eyes to make them not Google because I don't know, Google eyes just look very like elementary school craft to me. So I'm not a huge fan of them, but I don't mind how they look when they're stationary and off to the side, and that way, you can get that nice eye focus that we talked about. Here's the trick. I'm going to take my Google eye. I'm going to turn it on its side, so the little pupil is down at the bottom. I'm going to take my glue gun with a fine tip and make sure that tip of your glue gun is clean, wipe it off with a paper towel or something. I'm going to position the glue gun on the back on one side and push until it melts and pokes through. And then I'm going to just hopefully you can see what I'm doing here. I'm gonna squirt a little bit. A little bit of glue in there and then pull back. And that should glue that pupil in place. So it's not going to google around. I messed up while I was talking, and I see a little speck there. So that can keep your Google eye from wiggling around and making noise, and it also offsets that pupil towards the center in the nose area, so we get good focus. So that's just a little trick if you want to buy a bag full of Google eyes and make something that looks like these guys or this one or this one. These are all the Google eyes. Or you could do the filling with resin trick like I did, but that one it's not as successful. Number four would be purchasing resin sticker eyes. Here's a sample puppet here where I use this style of eye. And you can buy these cards. These are adhesive, and then they have a resin dome on top. And there's different styles of them, as you can see, and they come in different colors and sizes when you buy a card of them. That's just an option that you have. I would not rely on the stickiness of the eye to hold it on the puppet. You would need to use some kind of fabric glue as well to keep it on there because I find that these stickers, they don't stick to fuzzy fabric very well. But they do work. And like I said, there's a bunch of different styles that you can get, so you can get some interesting looks there. Number five is making your own eyes with resin. In the class project section, you'll find a sheet of Is that you can print out. You can print it on paper, or I actually prefer to print it on a card stock, but it doesn't matter which one. And then you can use some UV resin. This is a dome type or high viscosity, meaning it's thick and it gets hard, and this you put under a little UV light like what you use for doing nail manicures, and it cures it. And the way that you use this is you just um pour it on. You have to be careful. It does bubble a little bit, and then just put it right in the center. Let me see if I can get a better angle. Put it in the center and then just fill it until it reaches the outer area and let it bubble up like that. Maybe one more drop for this. See how it got a little bubble in there. We don't want that. It does tend to bubble a little bit more than other eye types. But if you already have resin, this is a interesting way to use it. And then I just put it under my little UV light for a minute. And that has dried. If it's a little bit sticky, it needs to go under the light. Again, it should be hot because that's part of the process of curing. And then you just take small scissors and then cut those out. That just gives you an idea of some different ones that you can make with this printable sheet. If you don't want to make this, don't print the sheet out. You don't need it. But if you already have the resin, this is a good way to get some interesting looking little plastic ice. To see how the resin eye looks on a puppet, here is a pair that we just had made there, and that's a nice little puppet eye. You could also do here's some smaller pink ones. Those the pupil is in the middle, and it's a little blank stare for me. I'm not a huge fan. And then the black rims, let's see. How do we like that. That's a nice look, too. I could deal with that. And then of course, these are little These puppets haven't been the mouth hasn't been installed or anything yet, but it just gives you an idea of what it's gonna look like. You do want the eye placement to be around the center of the head, and on the pattern piece, that's where it is. So that's where I'm putting them to show you these samples. So that's resin eyes. Again, if you're already into resin crafts, that's a nice way to do it. But if you don't already have all those supplies, it's probably going to be too expensive. Another option would be air dried clay. And here's just like Crayola crayon, even has a brand of air dry clay that is very easy to roll it into little balls, maybe squish it, and then you can paint the pupils on. You can paint the eyes themselves with some paint. I've used metallic paint on these green ones. You can color them, like, however you want. But you get that nice dome shape with that clay and it just dries It's an air dry clay. You could also do it with polymer clay and bake them in the oven. That works, too. But that's an option to make these little dome shaped eyes, whatever size, color, whatever you want with some air dry or polymer clay. Number seven is a ball joint to doll eye. And the reason it's called that is it's a lot of ball joint to dolls. Use this style of eye where it's not solid. It has a little hollow dip in the center, and then the center of it is painted, and then a little black pupil dot is put in there. And you can fill these with resin when you're finished painting or not. Either way it works. You can purchase these as finished eyes for ball joint to dolls. Look for the 16 millimeter size, 15, something like that. Or you could make your own, um polymer clay is one way of doing it, rolling out a little ball and then using a little ball tool to press the hollow and then cure those, bake them, whatever, and then you can do the painting. There are also little molds that you can buy that you can use UV or two part resin to make this shape. And I've even made these particular ones on my three D printer. So once you've got that little shape, then you can paint them however you want. And with this type, when there's a little pupil in the middle, once you fill that with resin, they're also called follow me eyes because as you move around, it looks like they're following you. So you can get good focus with this type of eye. This one here with the Black people doesn't have that same effect. That's not a bad look. And that's the ball joined to doll eye. Again, you could buy them. You could make them out of polymer clay, out of resin or three D print them, even if you know how to design those. Number eight is actually a new one that I've come up with, and I've not seen other people doing this, but I think that other people are doing it. I just haven't found them yet. These are clear fingernails for, like, gel manicures, and they have different sizes, and they're just these little clear nail tip things. And on the back side of it, you can paint it. I paint the pupil first and then paint the white background. And you can then trim them with nail clippers. Here's a big pair here on this guy. Or you could try let's see how these smaller eyes do. Let's have him looking off to the side. So you can see how that's actually not a bad looking eye for something like this, and it's relatively cheap. I bought this whole thing at the dollar store for a buck 25, and then you could even use nail polish to paint these or acrylic paints, whatever you have. So it's a pretty inexpensive solution, and then you would just glue those on. Here's another example where did you go? I have another one that uses these eyes it's right here in front of me, and I've glued a little piece of fabric to the top to give him a little eyelid. So that's another option that you have is you can glue some fabric around top bottom for eyebgs, things like that. And that works well with the large surface of these fingernails. So that would be the fingernail option. For number let's see where are we at nine. We're up to number nine, and that is using die cuts, whether you have, like, a cricket or a silhouette or even a physics machine, even a whole punch. You could use felt. And again, I like the peel and stick, the sticky back adhesive felt for if you're doing something like this. You could also use the craft foam. This is a two millimeter EVA sheet. You can buy this at the craft store. You could also use vinyl for your cutting machine. And you can make just different little eyes of different shapes and sizes. For the eye and the pupil are cut separately. Here are some different examples of some die cut eyes. This one is made from the EVA foam with a vinyl sticker pupil on it. And then these other two are made with the self adhesive felt, and I just ran them through a die cut machine to get my little circles. You could hand cut your circles, as well, but they're not going to be perfect little circles. If that's fine with you, then go ahead and do it that way. You can cut different shapes. It doesn't even need to be circular. And then you would just glue or stick those on. I do find that this adhesive on the self adhesive felt does stick well. And that's a cute little eye. That's nothing shabby at all, and really inexpensive one. But again, getting that perfect circle pretty much requires a die cut machine. And now we're up to number ten, and I don't really have a good sample to show you, but number ten would be three D printing your eyes. You could print any of these safety eyes. There are Google eyes that you can three D print. These are the BJD eyes. I'm sure you can find these files. They were very simple to make in Tinkercad, as well. That's what I just did, and it didn't take long at all. So three D printing eyes for your puppet, again, look for about a 15 millimeter or design something. If you're good at designing for your three D printer, you have that option, too. Where's his little black ones? I kind of like those better for the three D printed eye. The Those are some cute little puppet eyes that you can do. Actually, like a bonus, number 11 is combine different methods. Oh, wait, I had another bonus, too, because I totally forgot things like beads and buttons. These are little buttons that are little black eyes, little black glass beads. You could also do something like that to just have little tiny black eyes. That's another option. So that was the bonus number 11. So I guess there's bonus number 12, too, is that you can mix and match and combine and do all kinds of things together. Maybe you want to make a little dome out of clay, and then you put a glass bead in it to be a pupil. Or maybe you let's see. What else do we have? Maybe you want to do the foam. But instead of painting a pupil, you could use your little die cut, use a whole punch to get a little felt circle or something like that. So there's a lot of different ways. So don't think you have to do just one of these things. Think of mixing and matching and use whatever materials and tools that you have available to you, whatever skills you may already have. Combine those into a puppet eye that you like and that makes your puppet have your own unique style. Okay, and I did want to show you how to install the safety eyes just so you know a lot of people are kind of confused on how those work. So here are the two eyes that I've purchased, and here are the two backs. And I'm not going to mark my eye placement because I definitely did give you a place to mark your eye placement on the pattern, but you don't have to put your eyes there. You can put them really kind of wherever you want. Just don't let them interfere with the mouth. I'm using an all, and I like using this better than cutting a hole with scissors because it spreads the fabric fibers apart rather than cutting them. And then once you've got your hole punched, just put that little stem of the eye, and it can be hard to find in this fur. Just poke that through, pull it all the way down. And here's a tip for you. I do prefer to add a little bit of glue when I'm using safety eyes because I don't want them to unravel. I don't want that fabric to unravel. And I feel like it's just a much safer way of doing things because this will hold in place until the fabric unravels around it, and then it'll come apart. Make sure that the excess fabric is not getting in there, and then you just keep pushing push down until it's all the way in. And so there's one eye, and you should still be able to turn them if your pupil is not where you want it, but try to get it right where you want it. Okay. And I know I want the stem right there. Push that all through to make a hole. I felt one little thread snap. Ooh, that's a pretty big hole, actually. So I definitely want to have some glue on that. There we go. You can put the glue on the front side, as well. I'll even show you. If you wanted to do that, you could put it on the front. The reason I usually put it on the back is that I don't want any glue to seep out under the eye and show. So the back side is really a safer place for it. And then snap that all the way down know we got our two eyes on him. Now, this one I haven't put the mouth on yet, but that's fine. And this little guy that we've been working on, he's already been wired, but we could still put eyes on him. I think I'm just gonna glue some eyes on this one. Yeah, I want to actually try. Yeah, I think I like these little felt eyes. I want to see how that looks. So let's try that. These are the self adhesive felt, so I can just peel that make it simple. And I've already done the peel and stick on the pupil. And I want to get the pupils so that they're kind of in the center. I want them matched up. Here we go. Alright, so a little sample that we're working on. He's got eyes. He's ready to go. So you saw how quick and easy it was to do the safety eyes on this one and just gluing some eyes or peeling stick eyes on that one. And you've also seen a whole bunch of different a whole bunch of different samples of eyes that you can use. Oh, my gosh, there's so many. Like, I think I gave you ten options, but plus a couple of bonuses. So, wow. You have options. That might be the hardest part is choosing the eye to put on your puppet. So to wrap it up, we did a lot of different eyes. You can use all of these on pocket puppets. Here's a list of the ones that we did. I won't go over it again, but there's ten different types of eyes. Plus buttons and beads was the 11th, and then you can combine them. So there's all kinds of things you can do. I showed you how to install the safety eyes. They'll have the stem that goes through the fabric and then a little plastic backing that puts it on there. And we also did a pair of eyes that are just glued on. We also touched on how to position the eyes in the middle of the head. And why focus or eye contact is so important, and you want the pupils to be a little offset if you can. On some of the eyes, though, that's not going to be possible, but usually they're small enough and close enough together. 8. Stuff & Close: Now it is time to stuff and close our little pocket puppet. And if you've put wire in, you don't need to stuff the arms and legs because the wire is going to fill it out and it's fluffy fabric. So that's probably going to be all that you need. But you still need to stuff the body and the head. And if you did not use wire inside your pocket puppet, then you will need to lightly stuff the arms and legs. So to get started with that, I've actually got a second one here. I'm going to show you two different ways to close this one with a needle and thread, and then this one I'll do with a hot glue. You could use fabric glue instead. And just you want to firmly stuff the little body, and if you have wire, you want to make sure that the stuffing gets in front of your wire. And that's another reason why I love having hemostats. Besides turning, you can also stuff and get into all the little crevices and places that are hard to reach. I'm going to give him a little bit of a belly there, maybe a little more belly. That way, I can get it in front of that wire armature. There we go. Yeah, it's a nice little dough booy belly there. And we want to make sure that we lightly stuff the head but get all of the areas around here so that the cheeks puff out. We don't want to overstuff the head because that makes it harder to work the little clothes pin or clip mechanism. Just start putting it in there. I'm just using regular polyester fibrofll. Nothing fancy. And this small piece might just be enough to put in there, we'll see. And to test to see if it's stuffed well, just kind of push around on the edges and see if it feels hollow or not, especially those cheeks, because if it looks like that with real skinny, you might want to go ahead and stuff more into those cheeks to fatten them up. Just take the little ball of stuffing and slide it up against the fabric to get it into those cheeks. That'll really round out the head better for you. Okay, so for this one, let's do the hot glue to close him up, and that's going to be the fastest method. But it's not the most secure and it's not the most how would I say, if I'm selling something, then I do hand stitch. If I'm demonstrating something, then I'll often use glue. But I don't typically use the hot glue if I'm going to sell something because it's just a little less sturdy. That way? For the glue method, I'm going to use some kind of pin or needle or something like that that I use. It's just a spare one. It's a dull needle that has I use it to poke the glue in. And then my hot glue gun. So I'm just going to put a little line of hot glue and then just kind of drag the fabric over to it and pull it straight out. See like that, pushing in to that seam area until that hot glue grabs. And that's how we're going to do the whole thing. You want to make sure that the stuffing is not going to interfere with the pivot part of the clip. Okay. So I'm just pushing it down and out of the way. I also need to make sure that our fabric is gonna come all the way to the center here. This is much easier to do if you have a fine tip glue gun. If you have a fat tip on your glue gun, it's going to be much messier and harder to do. So that's some people say, This doesn't work for me, and it's probably the type of glue gun that you're using. You could also use something like fabrifix. This fabric glue is really good for this, too, but you have to hold it with little clips until the glue sets up, which is why I like the glue gun, and I have fabric glue sticks in there right now, so it sticks really well to the fabric. I think we're gonna need a little more there. This will give you a stiff seam, but that's actually okay because it gives a little bit more structure to the puppet's body and head. Just hold that together until it sets up. And then the last thing that I like to do is I do like to glue the fabric to that clothes pin or the clip so that we don't have stuffing that starts coming out the side. Again, you want to make sure that this is glued forward from where the pivot of the clip is because if you were to glue behind, then it's not going to work the mouth very well anymore 'cause you're essentially gluing your clip closed, and you don't want to do that. This is just to keep the stuffing from coming out through the sides over time. And also, down here at the bottom, I'm going to add a little bit down there, too, so that my fabric is touching that clothespin. It is a little bit messy. It's not the cleanest looking thing you've ever seen, but it does work nicely. So now his mouth is still going to move good. On this one, I did not move the clothes pin far enough. The clothes pin edge is actually here, and that's making his lip kind of have a powdery lip, which is fine. I still works good. Good. Real good. Okay, so that one's closed. That one's good to go. We will embellish it in a little bit. Now, if you want to do hand stitching, that's a little bit more complicated. But I will show you how to do the ladder stitch to close up the back of your pocket puppet so that you don't have to deal with the glue. Some people prefer hand stitching, some people absolutely hate it. So I'm showing you both methods just to see what you. About 18 " of strong thread. And when I say strong thread, I mean, it's actually an extra strong or button and craft, upholstery, something like that, because we're going to be pulling up really hard on this thread. We want to make sure it doesn't break. So a strong thread is what we use for this. I'm going to start down at the bottom, and I'm going to come out. Now I've got a knot already tied in my thread there. And I will warn you the arms and legs of your puppet are going to be catching your thread. So try to get those out of the way as much as you can. Just kind of get him up up against the body or something. They'll keep him from messing you up too much. Okay, so I've come out from the inside to the outside. I'm gonna go right very close to where I was and go inside again. This is just to make a knot to secure our thread. Now, you would want to use a thread that is more closely blended with your fabric so that it will blend in better. I'm going to use the white. Sorry, I should have used something else. It might not show up against the stuffing, but I want you to be able to see what I'm doing. So Okay, now I've got a nice firm knot there. I'm going to come up again about a quarter inch in the middle from that end of the seam, and then just go on the other side, and I'm taking a small stitch, about a quarter inch or less for the stitch length. Okay. And you're gonna see the pattern of this very soon. I'm gonna go straight across to the other side. And again, take about a quarter inch stitch on the other side, and it's parallel to this opening edge here, the raw edge. And I'm going to take several stitches like that so that you see I just keep going from one side to the other. This will give us an invisible stitch. It's called the ladder stitch. And you'll see in a minute how it really blends in, and you won't even see the white thread. So you see how it looks almost like railroad tracks. Let me get one more stitch in there and you'll see it. I'm not gonna lie. Fuzzy fabric is harder to stitch on because you can't really see what you're doing. You can't see where the needles going in. When it folds over, you can't even really tell that it's folded over. It is more of a hassle, but it's so worth it because it's just so cute to have that furrinss. Okay, so I've got several ladder stitches done, but I haven't pulled my thread tight. See how that looks like a ladder or railroad tracks. When I pull up on my thread, and that tightens up, and I'm actually going to kind of push down and squeeze the edges together. You see how that just disappeared, and you don't even see. That's the ladder stitch. And that's why we want to use the ladder stitch is because it really is invisible. So I'm going to continue all the way up to the bottom of my clip here and we'll speed through that. You just do the exact same thing from the right side to the left side, and each time you go across, you want to go straight across. So that the rungs of your ladder are even and not all wonky, because then you would fall off the ladder. Okay, once I get to the bottom of the clip, I'm going to go ahead and just make another stitch. We're gonna knop this. So from one side to the other and I'm going to leave a little loop. This is how we make a surface knot. I'm going to leave one loop of thread, take it in my right hand and pass the needle through that loop. Now I've got another loop in my left hand. I'm going to pass the needle through that left loop. And when you pull up on the thread, it does help to put your needle in the loop there to hold it, and then pull up on that thread, and it will give you a knot right down on the surface of the fabric, and you can't even see. Okay, now I'm going to just kind of weave my way over to the top because we got a little bit on the top that we need to stitch closed. Usually, I've got a little bit more than that, but this one didn't have a very big opening. And again, I want to anchor my thread. I'm gonna do it at the very top of that opening there. So I'm going to make a surface knot up here. This is basically like cutting the thread and re knotting it just without the cutting part. And again, through one loop and then through the second loop Oops. So now we've got another knot that's going to hold this top stitching in place. Okay. And we just do a couple of ladder stitches on this top area. And that clip is kind of in my way. It's angled upwards. And I'm not really sure why. Cause the wire and the neck, maybe. So when you're closing up your pocket puppet, you could either do the glue or the stitch, either one, whichever you are more comfortable with, whichever quality you want, it doesn't really matter. One thing I will say is, if you think you might need to redo your puppet on the inside, then do the stitching. Because the stitching, you can just clip the stitches and everything is just as it was. Whereas with the glue, you can undo it with the hot tip of your glue gun, but it's gonna be really messy. So so if you think you might want to be redoing this later on, like, maybe, Oh, I want to change a clip or something, then stitch it because stitching is very durable but not permanent very easy to undo. And then I'm just gonna make another knot to finish this off. And then we'll buy the thread on the inside. And you see how, even though I used white thread, you can't see it. That's fuzz. That's not thread. You can see a little tiny bit of the knot right there, but that's it. It really disappears, especially in this fur. And then just poke the needle through and bring it out an inch or two away. Pull on your thread kind of tight, and then cut it. And now the threadtail is buried on the inside, so we don't have any threadtail hanging out. Okay, what do you think, dude? I like it. Look at her cute little butt. Okay, cute little bud here. And you don't even see the seam. It's just totally disappeared. So that's the latter stitch. Now, I will warn you there's nothing holding this together on the sides here. And so I do like to go ahead and glue just to the clip area because I don't like my stuffing coming out. Just kind of poking that stuffing back in. Then I'm going to put just a little spot of glue. Again, we want it below where that clip is where the pivot point of the clip is. If you glue it up here, it's gonna be harder to move that clip. So just down here, let that fabric bounce back up, and there we go. That's it. Just test to make sure that it's still. Yeah. It moves very easily. He's cute. I love this shaggy red fabric. That's just a sweatshirt. To review this lesson about stuffing and closing, first, we stuffed, and you saw how using hemostats can help you stuff those tiny little areas and how you don't really need stuffing if you've got the wire armature in there as well. When we closed up the back of the puppet, there were two different options. There's a glue option. You could use fabric glue and some kind of pin or needle to use it as a tool to poke it into the seam there. Or you could hand stitch using the ladder stitch with a strong thread. The whichever method you choose to close up the back, I would recommend to glue just a little bit on the sides of the clip so that your stuffing doesn't come out those areas. And that's it. It's all closed up and we're ready to embellish. 9. Embellish: The last thing we have to do on our puppets is embellish them because adding a few extra details can really go a long way in bringing a character to life. For example, these guys are cute just with their big blue bug eyes, but if I add a little turquoise nose to kind of bring out the blue in the eye, it's much cuter, I think. A lot of times the nose really makes a difference. And these are just little pompoms. These are a 1 centimeter size, but you can go a little bit bigger with Let's see. I have some here. I think these are some of these are dollar store. Um, a little bit bigger. That works, too. I don't like the color, though. There's a little pink one. But I like the little tiny blue one that really brought out the blue of his eyes. So I'm just gonna glue that in place, fabric glue here again. Just a little spot of glue on there is all it takes. You don't want to put too much glue because then it'll seep out and show. And I'm trying to get this so it's not on his fur, but more on that backing. Just push that into place. And yeah, he's good too good. So that's all I'm gonna do on this one is just the little nose. I think that works. It's really cute. On the blue one that we've been working on, his felt eyes just don't stand out as much. I think he needs maybe a little bit more. So on this one, I've actually got some air dried clay that I just shaped into some features here, and I've got yellow. I just had a little tiny package of it. There's a big nose that I could give him. That's kind of cute, or maybe a smaller nose. Kind of like that better. And then these are little horns, so he can have little horns on his head. And I think that's gonna work. I think. Let's try it and see. You never know till you do it, but, I mean, everything falls off, so let's see what happens. And, again, this is just a little bit of air dried clay or you could use a polymer clay. And I just sculpted it by hand. This is something that kids could do. It's really not difficult, even for the horns. You just kind of shape it. I twisted it to give it a little bit of line there. Nothing complicated. Um, just some little craft store materials is all this took. But when we're finished, it looks cute. I got to get those horns on straight. These horns are not symmetrical, by the way, but that's okay. I'm not gonna freak out about that. Part of the problem when we glue on to fur, it's gluing onto the pile of the fur, the furry part. So it's going to have some play. It's gonna move around, and that's okay on a small puppet like this. But if you are going to have kids playing with these a lot, then gluing on an air dried clay is not going to be very durable. So I just warn you about that. But gluing on a pompom, that seems to work pretty well. This would be a choking hazard, still, though. Even with the safety eyes, this pompom could come off and be a choking hazard. None of these pocket puppets are really designed for small children. I don't really design anything for small children. I design for adults. Problem is small children want to play with it. So you do need to be careful about that, especially with the wire, and I'll add this to the section about wire, too. You should never put wire inside any kind of doll or puppet that a small child will be playing with. It could poke through and poke into them. It's more prone to break when they're mishandling in it and moving things back and forth a whole lot. So definitely anything with armature wire should be older children, teenagers, adults. Alright, so we've got our little dude here with his eyes. He needs something else. I think he needs a little bit more. And I'm going to take my inspiration from this little dude here. This is just some of that sticky felt, and I've cut it into little arc shapes and given him eyebrows. And I like that. I think this little monster needs something like that. Okay, I can't find my sticky felt, but what I did find is a little sticky, little sticky half circle. And that's going to work just fine because I'm just gonna cut the edges off. This is a little felt circle that goes on the bottom of furniture. And now it's not a circle anymore. But it's already sticky, so I can just give him a little eyebrows. Okay. So that's very simple, but it looks. I mean, I would buy it in the store. I think he's super cute. I think I like the glass or acrylic eyes better or the resins or the embroidered eyes. I'm not a huge fan of the felt, but I do like how this little face turned out. He's cute. Other things that you can do, you can add a little sprig of hair. This is some faux fur. That I've just glued onto the top, or if you wanted to, you could sew it on the top. And he also has little eyebrows. His are made from a furry yarn, and it's a two tone yarn, and then I just trimmed off the extra little fibers on the top, and he's got those little sticker eyes. So he's a cute little guy, too. Cute. I like his little belly. We've got. What else can you do? Here's another example of some faufur for hair. Not as huge a fan on this one, but his little nose is a piece of foam makeup sponge, and I've just cut it in half and cut a little wedge off of it so that now he's got a little pointy nose. You could also paint these makeup sponges with acrylic paint. It works really well. Here's another option for This is, again, a curly fur yarn instead of faufur. And I just took a little piece of it and glued it on top. Really nothing complicated or expensive there. And then your pattern does have a pattern for a wig, and this one's not attached right now. So the wig is going to look like this when you're finished. You cut the edge here and glue it to hem it. All of the edges are hemmed, and then you just cut out around where the clip is. The pattern doesn't include the cutout because without me knowing what kind of clip you're going to use or where you're placing it, I can't put it in the pattern, but once you put the wig on, you'll know you'll see exactly where you need to cut it out, just cut a little slip for that. So that is an option, and it works well, especially if you're not using fur. This is like a velvety or mochi fabric that chibby dolls are made out of. And when you use that kind of fabric, it looks more humani and then you put the wig on. That wig would also fit on, let's say this guy. I mean, it's not gonna look good, but, you know, it would fit on a monster furry monster as well. Or this guy, maybe this guy. And now, he looks like a newscaster or something. I don't know what that is. But if it's on this, if you wanted to make clothes for them, all you have to do to make clothes is take your pattern and then lay your piece of tracing the stabilizer on top and then just draw where you want the clothing. Now, you do have to kind of know what you want to do, but for a shirt, I would just go right there across the legs, get the arms. You're just drawing. Here's a T shirt. Okay. Right about there. And then just a scoop neck, something like that. So now I have a pattern for a T shirt. And the way that you would stitch that is put two pieces of stretchy fabric right sides together, and then lay this on top. It's just like you made your puppet body. You would want to stitch, let's see, the shoulder seam up here, and then you would want to stitch under the arm and the side. So you would stitch those darker areas for the seams. And then for the neck opening and the bottom hem, you could just cut it and leave the raw edges the way they are, or you could hand stitch or glue or even use, like, a thin fusible tape to hem those if you wanted to. But I didn't do it. When you're dealing with something really small, a lot of times those ms are just not as important because they blend in so well. And knit fabric, which is the stretchy fabric we're using, it doesn't fray, it doesn't unravel, so you don't have to worry about it coming undone. Also, not going to lie the cuff of a sweater. Can just be wrapped around him to make a little dress or, um, sock, fuzzy socks or regular socks, cut that and use that. Sometimes it already has the banding that's really nice and finished. And you can just use that as a neck line. I've done that many times. You could even use a sock. This is not a pocket puppet, but you can see this is just a sock, and it's a tube all the way around, and I've cut a little hole for the arms. So you could do the exact same thing with one of these little guys, especially like a child's sock would be skinny enough. It's an option. I'm just saying, It's always good to try different things. So that's how you could do some clothes. You have other options like bows or flowers or eyelashes. If you have false eyelashes, you could do something like that. Who needs a bow? Do you need a bow? Here's a little bow for you, Mr. Monster. That's not working for me. I think she needs a flower right there. Oh, yeah, I see that would work. Just different options of how to embellish. Maybe she needs the pink bow. Where'd that go here? On her little wig. Maybe. But you get the idea. You can always do things like that. You can tie things around their neck. Again, just a little scrap of stretched fabric, makes a nice little scarf. Another piece of furry yarn. Who needs a scarf? Who needs a pink scarf? Here, you got a pink nose. How about a pink scarf? So you can do things like that, too. Just do silly things, whatever you want. I mean, they're puppets. Puppets are silly. They're, you know, informal and fun. So I've tried to give you a lot of different examples here of what these guys can look like, different ways to embellish them, whether it's something simple with just a nose, maybe you add the little eyelids glued on, maybe you're going all out with a wig and clothing. Or some clay features and little eyebrows. There's so many things you could do. I think this guy he needs a little t shirt on. We'll have to work on that later. Other extra step that you might want to do just to kind of perk up your puppet a little bit is if you have a lot of fur caught in the seams, usually it's not so much at the top, but on the bottom, use a pin to rub across there, and that'll get that fur out. You can pick it out with the pin. You don't need any fancy equipment for this, just a pin or a needle or something. We covered a lot of different ways to add a little extra personality to your little pocket puppet. You could add noses made of a pompom or some clay, a lot of different things you could try there. You could add hair from fur or yarn. You could make your own clothes by using the pattern that you already have and just create your own clothing patterns from that. Even a sock works as a sweater. And then you could do extras like horns or bows or brows or eyelashes, come up with whatever you want to do with your little character and have fun with it. 10. Wrap-Up: You did it. We have officially walked through the entire process of bringing a tiny character to life. We have covered a lot of ground in this class, from tracing and sewing miniature pieces to mastering the mechanics of a tiny moving mouth and little poseable limbs. And, of course, we've explored ten or more different ways to create eyes and lots of other embellishment ideas to make a charming little puppet. The best part of puppet making is sharing them with the world. So please take a quick photo of your finished pocket puppet and upload it to the project gallery. I check the projects regularly, and I absolutely love seeing the characters that you create. Plus, your ideas might spark the next student's creativity. And if you enjoyed this class, please take about 30 seconds to leave a review so that other creative makers can find this class, too. If you want to keep the puppet making momentum going, come and visit me over at ballyhocreations.com. If you want to try this project with your embroidery machine, I have the machine files available for sale there along with a whole library of other unique puppet patterns and other creative plushies and dolls and other tools. While you're on the site, make sure to sign up for my newsletter. I'll give you tips on a more playful life behind the scenes of the studio, and you'll always know when new characters drop. Thank you so much for crafting with me today. Keep making, keep playing, and I can't wait to see your pocket puppets in the gallery. See you later, folks. Let's give a DVD by Bop choir, Muir. Ma. Hm.